writing four four-line animal poems to make your reader giggle

Don't Take Your Snake for a Stroll is pure fun. The book's short, four-line poetry structure can be impersonated by your students who love to play with words and love to play with rhymes. This is a great lesson to do right after students learn a less-interesting writing format, like a hamburger paragraph or a constructed response.

Three-Sentence Overview of this Lesson:

In Karin Ireland's delightful book, an odd-looking boy takes his unusual pets to common places with uproarious results. Student writers, inspired by Don't Take Your Snake for a Stroll, will compose four original poems about activities that shouldn't be done with interesting animals. Poems will follow an a-b-c-b rhyming pattern, and writers will choose their favorite poems and illustrate them. Teachers: Click here to see the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

Students can easily spot and replicate Karin Ireland’s sentence fluency pattern, which they can replicate; the trick is...can they capture a rhythm that flows in their original poems. Students should be strongly encouraged to use select adjectives and verbs to build strong word choice skills in their four-line poems.